Saturday, January 15, 2011

Caustic and Cutting

With Carlin dead, I can only be talking about Bill Maher. His take on why the American founding fathers would have thought the teabaggers are idiots is more than worth the price of watching.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Just Watching a Video

So I've got, at last count, a baker's dozen videos up on YouTube. Mostly, they are there so that I can link to them from one of the blogs, and I count myself lucky when one of them gets to two hundred views (as both Paula kayaking rapids in Sooke River and my interview with John Rogers have done). In order to be able to embed a video of the world's largest beaver dam, I copied a Canadian Government vid over to YouTube and was astonished when it suddenly ended up with over a thousand views. Turns out, the topic was covered on Ellen and I was a collateral beneficiary.

Last April, I posted a vid of the salmon spawning in Goldstream River--mostly so my sister could show her kids what it looks like. Or friends could show their kids. Whatever. But over the last week, I've received over 8,400 views of this little two-and-a-half minute video.

It turns out that a little over a week ago, some idiot threw a leak tracing chemical into Goldstream River, turning it bright green for a period. Thankfully, it should be non-toxic and have no lasting damage on the river. But what it means is that all of a sudden a lot of people were looking for video of Goldstream River. And, once again, I was a collateral beneficiary.

And, of course, once you start getting views, you move up the rankings, which makes it easier to find you and get more views--so the world's largest beaver dam is now sitting at over two thousand views. But the weird feeling I have is from the fact that I really didn't do anything to get these views. Ellen DeGeneres covered the beaver dam story, people stumbled over my video. Same with the green Goldstream story. I didn't auto-tune the news, or set up a stunt that caused me to be horribly injured in a really funny way, or anything like that.

Neither of these videos has gone viral. But it has made me a little more sensitive to the vagaries of internet memes and internet "fame". Sh*t happens, and often, it has nothing to do with you. Sometimes it's just a Lolcat.